Fostering Friendships in Yoga Class

Life is sweeter when you have someone to tell your secret to, share an inside joke, play a game, or listen to your story. For school-age children, friends are paramount. Establishing meaningful friendships is one of the major endeavors of this stage of life. Some children are naturally outgoing and make friends with ease. Others struggle to make and keep friends. Whether children are socially savvy or not, working out the rules of friendship is tricky business. There are several ways yoga can help.

Making friends in class

Yoga classes are a great lab where children can experiment with friendships. Classes include games, partner poses, sharing, and other turn-taking activities that provide opportunities to practice and negotiate friendship skills. The teacher can model communication skills and facilitate connection. For example, when it’s time for partner poses, it becomes instantly apparent who is popular in class and who is not. Three girls will jump on another girl and squeal, “I want to be your partner,” while another girl sits off to the side feeling left out.

Inclusive ways of partnering

Inviting students to partner with someone can prevent children from feeling excluded. The best way to make everyone feel welcome, even the shy kids, is to have them pair with others they have not paired with previously, or group the children randomly. Count the students, divide them into two groups and have each group count up to the number of people in their group. Then the ones pair up, the twos pair up, etc. This system eliminates any awkwardness that shy kids might feel in trying to choose a partner and also eliminates the popularity factor.

Partner poses involve many aspects of initiating and maintaining friendships. First, you ask someone if they would like to partner with you, just like you would invite a friend to share in any activity. Then you tune into what the other needs in this shared pose while communicating your needs to another. Being able to say what you need and want is an important skill, as is listening and responding to what another needs. Kids get to practice this in a supportive environment with direction, and then try it in other areas of life with less oversight. The initial safe space interaction helps build confidence and allows kids to better enter into similar situations where the conditions are not as controlled, (e.g. the playground, classroom, etc.)

Games that encourage connection

The collaborative nature of the yoga practice itself (versus the competitive nature of other types of activities) naturally encourages both sensitivity and connection. By practicing together, children see other children as friends instead of opponents. Yoga also increases self-awareness and self-esteem, two key factors in friendship.

“Join the Club.” One way to facilitate connection in class is to ask the students what kind of club they would like to start in school, if they could start any kind of club they wanted. Would it be a chess club, a yoga club, or a chocolate club? This helps students discover common interests and get to know each other better. “Oh, I love chocolate. I would totally be in your club.” Having a similar interest is a great way to get kids to initially open up to each other.

“That’s Me!” is another game we play that helps students discover common ground on which to base friendships. To play, everyone stands at the side of the room. The teacher makes a statement like, “I love chocolate!” If this is totally true about you, go stand on the left side of the room. If this is kind of true, stand in the middle. If this is not true, stand on the right side of the room. You can make any kind of statement: “I have pets” or “I wish I could get a better night’s sleep” or “My favorite subject is math.” Children see who is like them based on similar interests and they feel more inclined to make a connection.

“Share Circles” at the end of class is another way to promote friendships. Students can share how they are feeling after practice, what they liked best about class or they may share a drawing they made after the guided relaxation portion of class. This can promote empathy as well as feelings of camaraderie.

Emotional intelligence is key

Striking out impulsively is a failure to integrate emotions and reasoning. It is important for children to learn to label the emotions they and others are feeling. This ability becomes habit in the neural pathways and will serve them throughout their lives. Yoga helps kids understand, name, and express a wider range of emotions.

In yoga class, children are guided through mindful movements and breathing exercises that help them learn how to modulate their moods. Developing an awareness of emotions, grounded in physical sensations in the body, is one way the practice of yoga helps to develop emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the awareness of and ability to manage one’s emotions. It is characterized by self-awareness, mood management, self-motivation, empathy, and managing relationships.

Lyra is 11 years old and has been attending yoga classes for the last two years. When asked about the kind of challenges she faces in friendships, she said it was disagreements between friends. I asked her if she felt what she learned in yoga helped with her friendships, and she said that it helped her to be “more patient.” When there was a disagreement, she said she knew “how to stay calm.”

The emotional intelligence that is nurtured in yoga class is helpful in school and other areas of life. The guided relaxation also helps release tension and pent-up frustrations they may not have even realized they had. Not only are they left feeling calm and centered after class, they are also gaining skills to come back to center throughout the day. It is from this place of a calm center that children will be more skillful in all areas of life, whether a math test or a test of friendship.

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Mira Binzen has a degree in child psychology and is a certified yoga and iRest® Yoga Nidra teacher, yoga therapist, and co-founder of Global Family Yoga (globalfamilyyoga.com), a teacher-training program based in Chicago, focusing on children and families. She offers wellness consults for families by phone and Skype. Her e-mail address is mira@globalfamilyyoga.com.